


How familiar the danger

by crookedspoon



Series: Exchange Fics [82]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Character Death, Kissing, M/M, POV Rufus Shinra, Past Relationship(s), Treat, Trick or Treat 2020, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:49:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27288943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedspoon/pseuds/crookedspoon
Summary: Rufus had never quite believed the reports about Sephiroth's death. Yet when the man who killed his father confronts him, he is forced to admit that it's not the Sephiroth he had once known.
Relationships: Sephiroth/Rufus Shinra
Series: Exchange Fics [82]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/51139
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	How familiar the danger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Neurotoxia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neurotoxia/gifts).



Shinra personnel work fast when they want to. Certainly when the task at hand is to erase any evidence of the former president's murder. 

Rufus frowns at the spot his father is supposed to have fallen, unable to keep the displeasure from showing on his face. The carpet has been scrubbed clean as new, the floor polished to a mirror shine. He has watched the surveillance footage himself, and yet he still somehow believes it must have been tampered with. He has no doubt his father _would_ test him like this, to see if he could handle himself in a crisis.

What his father never understood about him is that there is no challenge Rufus will not rise to. Then again, his father had habitually underestimated his ambition, as if to his eyes Rufus were still a wide-eyed five-year-old trying desperately to appear clever just to gain his approval. 

But his father truly is dead. None of the board members would have been this eager to get Rufus under their thumb were it otherwise. They all hope more funding is coming their way now that the leadership has changed. Rufus knows the games they're playing. His best advantage is that they don't know his.

With one last glance at the floor – as if to make sure his father's ghost wouldn't suddenly appear to revile him (or worse yet, ask him to seek revenge) – he turns and crosses over to his father's egregious desk. _His_ egregious desk now.

He feels... cheated, in some way. Out of his father's death perhaps. He'd been scheming his takeover for so long he never expected the presidency to simply fall into his lap one day. For all his faults, his father had always seemed invincible to him. That's why he'd worked so hard to bring him down, because some part of him believed it could not be done. And if it could, how much sweeter that victory would have been.

In his ideal scenario, his father would have been around to witness his own downfall, to hear Rufus say, "I win," and to concede defeat. In his second most ideal scenario, he would have been the one responsible for his father's death. If not holding the blade that pierced his father's heart, then at least guiding it.

He rounds the desk, dragging his fingers along the smooth surface. All of this is idle rumination that his brain throws up like a cloud of dust to obscure the real issue that's been bothering him since he saw the footage.

It's not perverse delight that makes him press replay, although he would be lying if he said his father's murder left him entirely cold. The small monitors embedded in the desk flicker as they show him again what happened, from various angles.

He had not believed Palmer at first when he'd reported to have seen Sephiroth, yet that silhouette is unmistakable. The merciless blow he'd received just watching his tiny likeness move on the screen, Rufus had been utterly unprepared for. Had he been alone, he might have doubled over from the force of it. But he had not been alone, so he could not afford the luxury of reacting with anything more than the quizzical arch of an eyebrow.

What he really wanted to do was sit down and clutch at his chest. It just... it couldn't be. Sephiroth is dead – or so it was reported. Shinra has always been quick at labelling their SOLDIERs as KIA when they wanted to wash their hands off them, even before that sentence had been handed out yet.

Sephiroth's body had never been found. That was the one fact Rufus had clung to after his disappearance. As long as Sephiroth was alive somewhere, he told himself, there was a chance he'd come back, or at least contact Rufus _somehow._

For months, Rufus had explained the radio silence to himself in ever more elaborate ways – Sephiroth was injured in a ravine somewhere, Sephiroth had been captured and held prisoner, Sephiroth had lost his memory – until at last he'd accepted how naive and utterly foolish that was. Sephiroth is dead.

But just a few hours ago, Sephiroth appeared to be walking this tower again, and killing his father besides.

"Do you miss him?"

 _That voice..._ His heart kicks like a rampant Chocobo but when he looks around, no one is there. The room is still empty. _It can't be._

"He has always been standing in your way."

This time, the voice comes from close behind him. Rufus backs up against something immovable that had not been there a moment before. His hands are shaking now, though not from fear or cold.

"You've seen the footage."

A gloved hand descends on his brow like an iron band, cool against his feverish skin, holding his head to the shoulder behind him.

"You know I killed him."

Something thin and sharp presses against his exposed throat. Out of the corner of his eye, Rufus can see the enormous length of a sword extend beyond him. Not just any sword— _Masamune._

"Are you here to kill me now, too?" Rufus asks. His voice is strained and distantly he thinks how ludicrous it would be to die now. President for a mere handful of hours and already assassinated. Quickest turnover in history. Not the kind of record he had intended to set.

"Do you know why I did it?"

The breath is hot against his cheek, so close it's almost a kiss. Rufus swallows and his Adam's apple bobs against the blade, pricking the skin. He can feel blood beading at the cut and running down his neck.

"You asked this of me once."

His entire body is quivering as though a low electric current were running through it. He is released as abruptly as he was being held, and his legs nearly buckle under him. He catches the edge of the desk just in time to keep himself from falling.

He braces himself against the desk now as he turns to face his assailant. He needs the solidity of physical objects to ground him, because he cannot trust his eyes.

There in front of him is the man he had mourned for years, whose memories he had buried alongside his feelings long ago to absolve himself of them. Yet it must have been a shallow grave if they can resurface, undiminished by time and distance.

"Sephiroth..." he exhales.

Except, it's not him. It _can't_ be. He may look like a carbon copy of the original, but it might be just an illusion, just like in the surveillance footage. At any moment, the veil might lift and the monster behind it might reveal itself.

"Hello Rufus."

He sucks in a sharp breath. To hear his name intoned so melodiously in a voice he had once been intimately acquainted with but that he hadn't heard in years outside of dreams, it's exquisite – and excruciating at the same time.

It's been five long years and he's still bleeding from a wound that had apparently never healed, just been taped shut and forgotten about.

He could take it – he _would_ take it if the person in front of him were really Sephiroth. Yet there is something off about him that Rufus can't quite put his finger on. Like he's _wrong_ somehow. Mean in a way Sephiroth had never been.

This man – this _creature_ – advances and the sword he is holding out to the side vanishes in a haze of smoke. It hurts to see him move. He has the same gait, the same wicked glint in his eyes that Sephiroth had when he wanted to take Rufus to bed. His body remembers. It's trembling in anticipation.

Sephiroth – for he can't somehow _not_ think of him otherwise – walks right up to him until their bodies are brushing against each other, with barely a hair's breadth between them. Rufus is leaning away from him, bracing himself against the desk at his back.

"You're welcome," Sephiroth says and brushes his knuckles over Rufus's cheek. 

"You're not him," Rufus says and twists his head away.

"Oh?"

"The real Sephiroth never wanted anything to do with my patricidal plots." Rufus had been young then, they had both been, and he had not considered the consequences it would have had for Sephiroth when he asked.

"Real..." Sephiroth muses and tilts Rufus's chin towards his face. "Am I not real?"

Rufus half-expects him to capture his mouth in a kiss and loathes the disappointment he feels when Sephiroth doesn't fulfil that secret wish. Instead, he dips his head lower to suck at the wound on Rufus's neck.

Rufus gasps. His hands alight on Sephiroth's coat, though whether to shove him away or to pull him closer, he's not even sure himself. The material creaks beneath his clenching fingers.

Maybe it's the scent of death and roses clinging to Sephiroth that sends his mind into a tailspin, maybe it's the lack of closure that has kept a kernel of hope alive throughout those five long, incomplete years. Maybe it's the remnant of a memory that's still burning with desire for Sephiroth. Whatever it is, somewhere in the back of mind Rufus knows he's reacting to the wrong impulse but he is past caring.

When Sephiroth kisses up the column of his throat, Rufus does not push him away as he perhaps should. He allows it. When Sephiroth looks at him with those gleaming predator's eyes, Rufus still does not struggle or flee as he perhaps should. He matches him gaze for gaze. And when Sephiroth kisses him with his blood on his lips, Rufus does not draw back either as he perhaps should. He threads his fingers through Sephiroth's hair – that's just as glossy and smooth as he remembers – and kisses him back, with all the longing that has accumulated since their separation.

In this moment and in this moment only, Rufus can ignore his skepticism and pretend that the person kissing him is none other than the lover he'd presumed dead years ago. It doesn't heal the bleeding ache he's been carrying around since the first reports came out of Nibelheim, but he's certain nothing short of time travel would. He's been living with it just fine until now. Most days he even forgets it's there, if he's not denying its existence altogether. He's not still hung up on a relationship he never acknowledged in the first place, then ended mere days before the other party supposedly died, is he?

Either way, Rufus is not ready to let go when Sephiroth pulls back again. His fingers are snarled around his silver locks just to keep him here a moment longer as he catches his breath, forehead resting against forehead. This Sephiroth may not be like the Sephiroth he remembers, but five years is a long time. So much could have happened. Rufus himself is no longer the knowitall kid he used to be back then.

Sephiroth smiles at him, a dangerous smile showing too much of his teeth, but Rufus reminds himself that Sephiroth has always been more than a little unsettling. He just never wanted to admit it.

"Have fun with your new company," he says and presses one last kiss on top of Rufus's forehead. If there's a mocking undertone, Rufus chooses to let it slide. "I'm counting on you."

Although Rufus's hands are still snarled in his silver locks, Sephiroth steps away – solid beneath his fingers one moment, passing through them the next – and dissipates in a cloud of grey smoke.

A pit opens in Rufus's stomach as he questions both reality and his sanity. Sephiroth had been corporeal, yet how much could Rufus really trust his own senses? To his eyes, Shinra Tower had been swarming with ghosts only hours before, ghosts that no one else could see. Had Sephiroth been one of those? And if so, for what purpose had he come to Rufus? His last words were certainly puzzling. Did he expect Rufus to "repay" him for services rendered somehow? What is it he thinks Rufus is supposed to _do?_

Left staring at his empty hands, Rufus is struck with an epiphany: he's no longer content with the uncertainties surrounding Sephiroth's disappearance. _He_ is the new company president. All the secrets his father has kept away from him are _his_ secrets now and no one can bar him from anything anymore. 

After all these years, he might finally find out the truth about what happened in Nibelheim. Maybe that is what Sephiroth expects him to do. Whatever it is, Rufus intends to go digging.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Beautiful Stranger" from The Devil's Carnival.


End file.
